As the Major League Baseball season gets into full swing, Comcast is hitting away with the latest options in Video On Demand. The Comcast Media Center’s storied history of VOD offerings gives the network plenty of experience with efficient turnarounds for on-demand game feeds and highlight packages, so it is no surprise that two major RSNs have made a successful slide into the VOD market. Comcast SportsNet Bay Area and Comcast SportsNet Chicago are now offering MLB VOD free to Giants, White Sox and Cubs fans who subscribe to digital cable. “While the game is being broadcast, we’re simultaneously recording it and encoding it,” explains Gary Traver, COO of the Comcast Media Center (CMC). “We build a metadata core, encode the original content, pass it through a second pass and build a file for fast-forward, pause and rewind features.”

KJZZ Salt Lake City UT, local broadcasting home of the NBA’s Utah Jazz, is, for the first time, broadcasting all Utah Jazz playoff games in high definition. The move is the result of an ongoing renovation at KJZZ to go full HD and, eventually, will result in all Jazz NBA telecasts being available in HD.

The National Hockey League is using ExpressVu HD personal video recorders to view video replays of Stanley Cup playoff action in HD. “The upgrading of HD recording equipment in our facility is part of the NHL’s three prong attack to move to HD,” says John Shannon, executive vice president, NHL Broadcasting and Production. The NHL also uses Panasonic HD cameras, an overhead camera system, and a Trilogy digital intercom system for in-arena review by referees. Three HD recorders are located in each arena to capture replay angles from the Panasonic cameras.

For sports fans whose Internet routines do not include a daily visit to ESPN.com, the sports network has come up with a simple solution – bring ESPN.com to the fans via a syndicated video player. “We realized that there is value in reaching out to other areas where our consumers are,” explains Matt Murphy, SVP of digital video distribution at ESPN. “Research showed us that sports fans by habit often go to just a handful of sites, so our goal is to go out there and continue to reach the fans by syndicating our content outside of ESPN.com.”

Remote Transmission Management has joined the Sports Video Group as a mobile sponsor. RTM is a remote encoding service provider to the broadcast, entertainment and commercial television industries in the United States. Alliance Digital, a virtual media company h as also joined the Sports Video Group as a premier sponsor.

The Wall Street Journal reports that NBC and the National Hockey League plan to announce that they have extended their broadcast agreement for another year. The deal means NBC will continue to show the "Sunday Game of the Week" starting in January and running through the end of the regular season. The network will then provide weekend coverage of the playoffs and Games Four, Five and Seven of the Stanley Cup Finals.

Los Angeles, CA-based Sweetwater Digital Productions has acquired a complement of 32 Fujinon HD lenses for the company’s new high-end production truck, “Cobalt.” The bulk of the new lens order is equipped with Fujinon’s Precision Focus Assist technology, a built-in feature that addresses precise focus issues in HDTV production.

Solid State Logic Gravity system and Omneon Spectrum video servers have been integrated and successfully tested together. The combined systems deliver a streamlined workflow for media operations. The Gravity system oversees all asset management of media, tracking and facilitating the workflow from ingest through production editing while the Omneon media servers provide ingest and playout functionality.

FOR-A Corporation of America, introduced the HVS-5000 switcher series at NAB 2008 held in Las Vegas last week, from April 14-17, 2008.

BBC Outside Broadcasts made use of Camera Corps Poolside Trackcam plus two under-water flip-turn camera support systems to capture the action at the Ninth FINA World Short Course Swimming Championships held at the Manchester Evening News Arena.

ESPN and the NFL Network will be using Glowpoint’s teleconferencing systems throughout the 2008 NFL Draft. Glowpoint’s IP-based video services are used to broadcast live interviews with coaches, owners and players from 32 locations placed at various NFL team headquarters. Each of the 32 team sites has a Sony camera along with Glowpoint providing the backhaul communications over T1’s.

Comcast SportsNet has announced Troy Ewanchyna as the Network’s new senior director of digital media. Ewanchyna will oversee the development of Comcast SportsNet’s strategy to expand the digital presence of the Comcast SportsNet family of networks to new multimedia platforms. Ewanchyna will report to Russ Chandler, Comcast SportsNet senior vice president of business development.

Joseph Electronics is now a master U.S. distributor for Wohler and PANORAMA dtv products. This new relationship delivers products directly to broadcasters from its warehouses and supplies sales, service, and engineering support in addition to competitive pricing to its considerable base of broadcast clients.

Video streaming from the workplace dominated NCAA March Madness traffic, according to Nielsen Online, a service of The Nielsen Company. A remarkable 92 percent of video viewers at NCAASports.com streamed content at work, where they viewed 80 percent of the site’s overall streams, accounting for 74 percent of all time spent viewing video at the site.

Solid State Logic, announced a new Gravity interface to Apple’s Final Cut Pro editing software. The integration allows for the seamless sending of Final Cut Pro compatible files from Gravity to a Final Cut Pro editing system without rendering.

A new combined media fiber optic transport system, known as LightViper Shadow, is now available from FiberPlex. The Shadow is designed for live sound and broadcast production, fixed media installations and remote recording applications and the 2.5-GHz system will handle a variety of media, including audio, intercom, Ethernet, RS422/232/485 control, composite video (EIA-250C) and TTL data.

Crawford Media Management, a division of Crawford Communications, Inc. one of the largest broadcast facilities in the United States, acquires a new betacam tape robot by SAMMA Systems. This state-of-the-art robot, coupled with Crawford's existing SAMMA Solo videotape to digital file migration systems, enhances the Company's leading-edge services.

I.B.M. is the latest company to prove that cloud computing - in which data centers with vast stores of information can be tapped from afar through a personal computer or cellphone - is gaining legitimacy on a large scale. The New York Times reports that I.B.M. is entering the market for Internet-focused data centers with computer systems designed to reduce power consumption sharply and take up less floor space. The move is the most recent sign that the major computer makers are beginning to compete aggressively to supply Internet companies and others with the specialized hardware needed for so-called cloud computing.

The New York Times reports that Microsoft is the latest giant to join the cloud computing market. Microsoft has announced a data storage and Web software system called Live Mesh that is intended to blur the distinction between software running on the Windows operating system and an array of services that will be delivered to a growing collection of electronic gadgets.

The new NHL Network Online, a broadband media experience that launched on April 9, is driving record traffic to NHL.COM.